I received my Ph.D. degree at Robotics, Embodied AI, and Navigation In-vivo Lab, Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Hongliang Ren and Prof. Jiewen Lai. Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as an Embedded Software Engineer working in the automotive industry at Continental Automotive in Singapore. Before that, I conducted research in Prof. Chengkuo Lee’s lab at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore and received my M.Sc. degree in 2019. I completed my undergraduate studies in Information Engineering at Soochow University from 2014 to 2018.
My research emphasizes efficient & robust medical image analysis and intelligent robotic surgery. I am recently working on Vision Foundation Models, Multi-modal LLM, and World Models.
🔥 News
- 2026.08: Successfully passed my Ph.D. Thesis Defense and became a Dr. now!
- 2026.08: One paper on tissue point tracking in surgical videos is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. (IF: 12.4).
- 2026.02: One paper on Vascular Motion Magnification in endoscopic videos is accepted by Advanced Engineering Informatics (IF: 11.5).
- 2025.11: One paper on multimodal (vision-language) surgical tissue&instrument point tracking is accepted at AAAI2026 (Oral).
- 2025.06: One paper on semi-supervised polyp segmentation is accepted by Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics (CMIG, IF: 5.5).
- 2025.03: Two papers on ESD Dissection Trajectory Prediction and Dissection Zone Segmentation are accepted at ICRA 2025 and IPCAI 2025, respectively.
- 2024.10: Two papers on vision-guided robotic surgery have been accepted at IEEE ROBIO 2024.
- 2024.08: One paper “Benchmarking Robustness of Endoscopic Depth Estimation with Synthetically Corrupted Data” has been accepted at the Simulation and Synthesis in Medical Imaging (SASHIMI) workshop at MICCAI 2024.
- 2023.08: Our paper “SAM Meets Robotic Surgery: An Empirical Study on Generalization, Robustness and Adaptation” has been accepted as an Oral Presentation at the MedAGI workshop, MICCAI 2023.
- 2023.06: Our paper “Generalizing Surgical Instruments Segmentation to Unseen Domains with One-to-Many Synthesis” is accepted by IROS-2023.
- 2023.06: One paper about robust medical image segmentation is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE, 7.9).
- 2023.05: One paper about annotation-efficient polyp segmentation was early accepted by MICCAI-2023.
- 2022.06: One paper about synthetic data generation from limited sources is accepted by MICCAI-2022.
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💼 Internship Experience
XGEN Labs
World Model Algorithm Intern · May 2026 - Nov 2026
Contributed to:
- Dual Exam: Controlled Evaluation of Multimodal Agents and World Models
- Generative World Simulation with DAO and JING
Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR)
Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Foundation Model Algorithm Intern · Nov 2025 - Feb 2026
Research output: SurgMotion: A Video-Native Foundation Model for Universal Understanding of Surgical Videos.
📝 Publications
*: First author; **: Corresponding author
Conference Papers
Bridging Vision and Language for Robust Context-Aware Surgical Point Tracking: The VL-SurgPT Dataset and Benchmark
Rulin Zhou*, Wenlong He*, An Wang*, Jianhang Zhang, Xuanhui Zeng, Xi Zhang, Chaowei Zhu, Haijun Hu**, Hongliang Ren**
The Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26) (Oral)
SAM 2 in Robotic Surgery: An Empirical Evaluation for Robustness and Generalization in Surgical Video Segmentation
Jieming Yu, An Wang, Wenzhen Dong, Mengya Xu, Mobarakol Islam, Jie Wang, Long Bai, Hongliang Ren
MICCAI 2025 Efficient Medical AI (EMA) Workshop
Web-based Augmented Reality with Auto-Scaling and Real-Time Head Tracking towards Markerless Neurointerventional Preoperative Planning and Training of Head-mounted Robotic Needle Insertion
Hon Lung Ho*, Yupeng Wang*, An Wang*, Long Bai, and Hongliang Ren**
IEEE ROBIO 2024
Journal Papers
EndoControlMag: Robust Endoscopic Vascular Motion Magnification with Periodic Reference Resetting and Hierarchical Tissue-aware Dual-Mask Control
An Wang*, Rulin Zhou*, Mengya Xu*, Yiru Ye, Longfei Gou, Yiting Chang, Hao Chen, Chwee Ming Lim, Jiankun Wang, Hongliang Ren**
Advanced Engineering Informatics (AdvEI) 2026
Preprints
SurgMotion: A Video-Native Foundation Model for Universal Understanding of Surgical Videos
Jinlin Wu, Felix Holm, Chuxi Chen, An Wang, Yaxin Hu, Xiaofan Ye, Zelin Zang, Miao Xu, Lihua Zhou, Huarui Wu, Huai Liao, Danny T. M. Chan, Ming Feng, Wai S. Poon, Hongliang Ren, Dong Yi, Nassir Navab, Gaofeng Meng, Jiebo Luo, Hongbin Liu, Zhen Lei
Preprint, 2026
Book Chapter
3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery
Mengya Xu, Tiebing Tang, Ziqi Guo, An Wang, Beilei Cui, Long Bai, Hongliang Ren
Handbook of Robotic Surgery, 2024
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2024.09, SUSTech Fellowship
- 2018.06, Excellent Graduate of Soochow University
📖 Educations
- 2021.10 - 2026.08, Ph.D. Candidate, Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
- 2018.08 - 2019.06, M.Sc., Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore
- 2014.09 - 2018.06, B.Eng., Information Engineering, Soochow University, Suzhou, China
💻 Teaching Assistant
- Embedded Systems Design, 2024.09 - 2024.12
- Intelligent Interactive Robot Practice, 2024.01 - 2024.05
- Intelligent Wearable Electronics, 2023.01 - 2023.05
- Probability for Engineers, 2021.09 - 2021.12, 2022.09 - 2022.12, 2023.09 - 2023.12
- Robotic Perception and Intelligence, 2022.01 - 2022.05